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On Tuesday, March 11, Red Hat released the Beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2. The Beta is expected to last approximately two months, with the final, supported update appearing soon after. During the Beta, Red Hat’s QA group, partners and customers will put the update through extensive testing for hardware support, feature enhancements and correct application operation to ensure that the final update is as solid as possible.
It is worth noting that although the Linux kernel is still 2.6-based, the number of enhancements between 2.6.0 and 2.6.24 (the latest version) are probably as extensive as between previous major releases, such as 2.2 to 2.4 or 2.4 to 2.6. This is because the 2.6 incremental development model is working very well, so that enhancements get merged upstream in manageable amounts. Who knows, perhaps the days of the “big new kernel release” are behind us, something that is a credit to the quality of the Linux kernel and the open source development model.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was released almost a year ago, in March 2007. Our customer response has been overwhelmingly positive; it has been a catalyst for more and more companies to adopt open source infrastructure. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is the core of our Linux Automation architecture, which delivers major gains in operational efficiency, capital expense reduction and operating expense reduction. This expands the value which open source provides by an order of magnitude.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has gained some industry awards, from organizations with interesting and important viewpoints.
In January, it was recognized as SearchEnterpriseLinux.com’s “Product of the Year” in the Linux Server Distributions category.
This month, Datamation announced its 2008 Product of the Year winners and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 received the most votes in the Enterprise Linux category. Datamation’s picks were selected by its readers, which are made up of IT professionals from across the industry, and we’re pleased to be picked as an outstanding product by this experienced crowd.
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If you’re looking to get more information about what Red Hat can offer you in the virtualization space, we’ve been hosting a virtualization webinar series so that our customers, partners and anyone else that’s interested can hear about our capabilities straight from our product experts. The most recent webinars provided more information about high-availability infrastructures and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 database virtualization performance. We invite you to watch them to learn more.
Our webinar on December 12 was hosted by Andrew Cathrow, a Product Marketing Manager at Red Hat. It featured information on “Building a high-availability infrastructure with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle.” A focus was placed on the powerful new features incorporated into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, including server virtualization, storage virtualization, high availability, load balancing and clustering. Watch the webinar to learn about how you can drive costs our of business and deliver a scalable and highly available infrastructure using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
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On October 29th, 2007, Sun Microsystems announced three new TPC-H performance results that are dramatically better than any previous result. These benchmarks are based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.4 running the ParAccel Analytic Database on a cluster of fifteen SunFire x4100 systems (each configured with two dual-core AMD Opteron processors). The chart above provides a high-level summary of the results, extracted from the TPC-H website. It shows the quantum leap in performance that these results represent.
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Today, Red Hat announced that customers can now purchase Red Hat Enterprise Linux “in the cloud” in conjunction with Amazon Web Services. Wondering what “in the cloud” means? “Cloud”-based web services allow customers to very easily scale up and down their compute power as the demands on a business fluctuate. It’s the use of networked infrastructure software and capacity to provide resources to users in an on-demand environment, offering a set of typically virtualized computers that can grant users the ability to start and stop servers or use compute cycles only when needed, often paying only for the use of those services. Sounds flexible and convenient. And now you can take advantage of it through Red Hat.
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Last week, IBM announced a world-record industry-standard performance benchmark result using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. This benchmark follows a long line of Red Hat Enterprise Linux world-record results published recently. Here are some highlights.
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This week, IBM announced that it has received the highest TPC-C performance result ever achieved by a 4-processor server. And it’s running Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform to be exact. The IBM System x 3850 M2 server and 64-bit IBM DB2 9.5 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform has set a new record for 4-processor performance, achieving 516,752 tpmC on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark. (IBM System x3850 M2 with the Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X7350 2.93 Ghz (4 processors/16 core/16 threads) 516,752 tpmC, $2.59 USD/tpmC, availability of March 14, 2008.)
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A critical factor in the success of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux family has been the rapidly growing portfolio of certified ISV applications that customers can select to run. Since we’ve just passed a big threshold – 3,000 certified applications – it seems like a good opportunity to look at progress so far.
The Red Hat ISV Partner Program has been instrumental in the growth of certified applications. We encourage the combination of open source and traditional technologies to strengthen the fabric of enterprise computing in order to provide technology solutions that give our customers more choice. Software vendors with applications certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux are invited to join the program here.
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I was invited to do a presentation at the High Performance on Wall Street conference in New York City on September 17 to discuss Red Hat’s realtime development project. For the benefit of those not in attendence, I’ll briefly recap the main points of my talk here.
My main intention was to help the audience become more informed. I consider this important because realtime offerings have been getting a lot of buzz lately, but the term itself and true benefits of realtime are often not well understood. Realtime is a great fit for many deployments, but it is not a silver bullet for all performance woes. The more informed the customer is, the better prepared they are to follow the right path to their performance objectives.
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Not many people think of virtualization as a way to make applications run faster. In fact, the general assumption is that things are likely to be a little slower, hopefully not too much, but that the other advantages easily outweight the performance drop.
OK, so virtualization does cost some performance. But with the para-virtualization in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, we are seeing very small drops. Of course it’s application dependent, but single-digit percentage points seem to be the norm. Given the increased operational flexibility, for most this is absolutely a cost worth bearing. Bottom line: it makes sense to run any Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 system with paravirtualized guests.
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